Gates of Ivory and Horn
by Ryo Hoshi
Summary: Wandering through a nightmarish world, Xelloss seeks for Filia... [ Minor revisions have been made. The 'strongest' material in this is the violence, though there is some minor sexual content. If you have problems with violence...don't read this. ]
1. Prologue :: Dream a Little Dream

Okay, y'all -- this is the edited 'n' reformatted version... 

Disclaimer: Slayers belongs to Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi, not me. I'm not making any profit off of this, too. 

**Warning**: This chapter contains violence, as does a later one. All violence is described, since my Language Arts teachers always told me to describe things. If you have any complaints, well, complain to them. I did. Oh, and there's surrealism everywhere, which my teachers complained about to me. (But they never did say, "This has to be realistic," when giving an assignment, even when I asked them if it did.) 

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**Gates of Ivory and Horn **

_Part 0 * Chapter 0_  
Dream a Little Dream 

Xelloss opened his eyes slowly, not quite sure if he was awake because he was certain that under normal circumstances he'd not be feeling his non-existence pulse in his head. His ears slowly started working, and he could hear...screams...  
That voice sounded familiar.  
His eyes finally focused, and he saw... A blood-stained stone floor below his feet by at least a yard. A low stone altar, with grooves on it so that blood spilled upon it would flow down into a floral vase that simply didn't match the whole dungeon decor of the room.  
The current occupant of the altar was Filia. Two figures, wrapped in cloths in such a way to blur their features to the point where Xelloss couldn't begin to guess their gender, no less their species, were leaning over her bare chest. One of them was holding a bloody-edged scalpel, and it looked like they were silently talking over where next to cut the woman on the altar.  
Slowly, his mind put together the pieces and he realized that Filia was naked, though her blood formed on her a sick parody of a body stocking, like a thick coat of paint that had been applied to her skin.  
He watched, feeling sickened yet fascinated and wondering why he found this sickening.  
The two figures talked to each other without making any sounds that Xelloss could hear, and one of them produced, from nowhere, a long knife, the scalpel vanishing. Its blade gleamed darkness, a sharp and jagged black tear in the foggy dimness of the room and the bright spotlights on the altar. The one holding the blade lifted it and turned the blade, and lifted it like a priest about to perform a sacrifice.  
If that figure's face had been uncovered, Xelloss was sure from its pose and movements, there would have been engraved upon it a gigantic evil grin.  
The show, the silent gloating, over, the figure turned back and plunged the knife into Filia's stomach, just deep enough to cut through the upper layers of tissue and leisurely pulled the blade to her collarbone. A second leisurely cut from shoulder to shoulder of the same depth crossed the top of the first.  
The knife-holding figure stepped back to allow its partner -- assistant? -- to pull back to two flaps of flesh, revealing Filia's ribcage. The blade-holder still standing back, a pair of pruning shears, or what looked very much like pruning shears, were gotten from the same place as the knife by the assistant.  
The sound of Filia's ribs getting cut was a sharp snap of breaking bone.  
The shears were returned to where they had come from, and the one who had cut her ribs gingerly pushed the cut open so her still-beating heart and her lungs, struggling to pull enough air in, were revealed.  
The rib-cutter stepped back, and the blade wielder stepped forward.  
There was a grace in this macabre dance, one only gotten from having danced it hundred, thousands, millions of times.  
The knife deftly cut the cords of flesh holding the heart in, and, blood now pouring everywhere, her heart was lifted out and held up on display to the universe.  
As what passed at least for reality faded into the mists of unconsciousness, Xelloss wondered how she could still be screaming. 

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Okay, people. Time for the ground rules to get laid out: 

I can be bribed to get more of this done sooner with the application of comments and reviews. (Fanart based off of this works, too.) I can also be bribed to explain some of the references to more obscure sections of mythology and the like with the same techniques. 

So, _please_ review and / or comment! (If you are a fellow author on fanfiction.net, please sign your reviews so I can take a look at your own work and at least try to return the favor.) 


	2. Part 1 : The Ivory Gate :: Welcome to My...

Well, this time I'm starting with a little explanation -- of the title, at least. This should also give you a bit of warning of what's going on, too.  
The title refers to two gates in Greek / Roman myth, from which dreams leave the realm of Sleep. True -- as in, prophetic -- dreams leave via one of the gates and false -- as in, deceptive -- dreams leave via the other gate.  
As for what relevance the prologue has to the actual plot...the answer is everything and nothing. 

Slayers belongs to Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi, not me. I'm not making any profit off of this, too. 

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**Gates of Ivory and Horn **

_Part 1 * Chapter 1_  
The Ivory Gate * Welcome to My Nightmare 

Xelloss woke up, sitting up, eyes wide open and unseeing, gasping for breath. That nightmare had been so vivid-seeming, so realistic...while he was in it. But in the cold hard light of the waking world, he knew that it couldn't have been real.  
As a little time passed, his senses started working.  
He wasn't in his lair at Wolf Pack Island. The matress beneath him -- if it was there at all -- felt like rock, a distressing change from the pile of hides he was used to, and the platform it was on wasn't quite as tall. The walls themselves were made out of some kind of dressed and unnaturally uniform stone-like substance; for somewhere else the name of the material, concrete, floated into his mind. The minimal furnishings, which must have either been designed for children or with the discomfort of most adults who might have to use them, and the three doors all in a row on the wall opposite his bed were made of metal. The only items in the room, in fact, that wasn't made of metal were a small tiled booth catty-corner to him with metal-framed glass walls and a light black curved sheet of glass set in the wall behind him. He wasn't sure that the minimal and thin bedclothes were cloth, their cold and snaky slick-smooth feel, dull pale gray color, and stiffness being something he'd expect more from metal then from fabric and his 'pillow' he suspected of being made of the same substance as the walls.  
There were no windows: the light in the room came from something set into the ceiling. The light wasn't quite like any light he had seen before, with a harsh edge that not even the brightest of magically produced lights he could remember having seen had.  
He could hear a hissing sound, not quite enough like a snake's hiss to make him comfortable, and the air smelled...wrong. Not quite old, not quite used. A bit metallic, a bit chemical, a bit of something he couldn't quite place.  
He didn't like this place, not in the least.  
Xelloss swung his legs off the bed and walked to the three doors. The first one's handle refused to move: locked.  
The second one opened, revealing a closet. Inside was a small selection of clothes. An undershirt, knee-high socks, and jocks, the same color as the bedclothes and looking like they'd have the same feeling against his skin. A shirt and pants, which did look like they were made out of real cloth of some smog gray shade and cut for your person made out of boxes; they looked to be a near miss of the right size. Shoes, the same shade of gray as the shirt and pants, made out of some material that thought it was leather and which was alone in that opinion. On the door was a floor-length mirror.  
Xelloss looked into the mirror and winced. He looked like he had slept on a barely padded stone platform, which he suspected was what he'd discover if he had dared look. He winced again as he noticed his eyes, looking rather raccoonish and most definitely human.  
Which was the dream, him having a nice happy (relatively speaking, of course) job as one of the most powerful mazoku around and serving Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, who was a very good mistress...or this impersonal, uncomfortable, and most of all information-deprived existence as some human?  
He found that the third door would open, too, and then smiled. This, then figure out a way to wash himself -- if that was provided in his little cage -- and maybe he'd feel a bit better. 

He walked across the room a few minutes later, to the small glass booth that he had yet to inspect. Inside was what looked vaguely like a metal flower-head designed by somebody who hadn't ever actually seen a flower set high up on one of the tiled walls, and set into the tiled floor of the booth was what looked like a thick metal sieve; the tiles and the matte metal of everything matched in a dismal sort of way. Xelloss cautiously set one foot inside, and, when nothing happened, slowly drew the rest of his body in.  
The glass door of the thing swung shut. He pushed at it and found that it had somehow locked, though he couldn't remember seeing a lock on its frame. He heard a watery hiss, and could smell something moist. He looked at the metal flower head and saw that there was water coming from it. He stepped closer to it, away from the door, and discovered that there was a bar of soap on the floor along with what he determined to be a washcloth by a process of elimination.  
They had matched the floor tiles.  
They still did.  
The soap didn't have even the slightest soap-scent to it, preferring to smell rather like a small wet piece of light-colored nothing. The washcloth preferred to smell like a small sheet of light-colored nothing.  
The water felt and smelled wrong, the water feeling slimy as much as it felt wet and smelling more chemical then the air.  
When the water finally stopped, long after Xelloss was sure that he had gotten all the soap rinsed off of his body, the door unlocked itself and swung open. He walked, not really caring one bit about the fact he was dripping water everywhere, to the closet.  
Stuffed into one of its corners he found a towel.  
The towel could have used a wash, but he wasn't in the mood to care much about it aside from fantasizing some about finding whomever had stuck him in here and killing him, her, or even them slowly with that towel.  
After he had finished dressing, he tried the locked door. The door slowly swung out into the almost-featureless hall, except for more doors that looked just like this one spaced out evenly. At the very end of the hall was a staircase, made out of concrete and gray metal just like everything else.  
Xelloss walked down the hallway and went down the stairs to see what the world looked like. 

The streets were polychromatic in grays, with the only real relief from the eye and mind numbing gray being the cropped hair and dulled eyes of the expressionless automatons walking purposefully somewhere or elsewhere. They moved too evenly, with too much organization, to quite think of them as human. They were all dressed in clothes just like the outfit Xelloss had found in the closet in his cell, right down to the colors and textures.  
Xelloss glanced up at the sky -- a sky gray, with cloud gray clouds floating peacefully towards the bright gray sun -- and wondered if this too was a dream.  
But it was so realistic; he could smell the chemically clean scents of the streets, feel the unnatural stillness of the air, hear the surreal silence.  
He smiled slightly to himself and joined one of the orderly streams heading elsewhere. Somewhere was the person he knew he had to find...  
Somewhere out here had to be Filia.  
He didn't try thinking of why he felt that he needed to find her. He didn't want to. He knew, somehow, that it was easier to not ask himself questions. 

Eventually the stream he had joined entered a square. He moved out of the shuffle of the moving bodies and watched the silent mass walk through in all-too-logical patterns.  
A feeling of deja vu surrounded him.  
He knew, somehow, that he had stood here before, though this was the first time he could remember this, watching.  
Watching for...  
...There! A glimpse of long blonde hair, the tips of pointy ears peeking out from underneath it, at the opposite corner from the one he stood at.  
Xelloss started across the square, pushing and shoving at the automatons, to get across.  
It took him too long; he could see, several blocks away in one direction, the blonde walking on.  
Xelloss pushed and shoved his way forwards, always feeling like instead of getting closer to her he was getting farther and farther behind, but he could always see the shine of the sun upon her hair, leading him on. 

Xelloss noticed as he followed what he hoped was Filia through the too-crowded streets that the buildings were getting shabbier, slummier, in a too-clean way. The street itself was getting narrower. There were fewer people between him and Filia now, but that little crowd was too dense to break through.  
Eventually the blonde hair turned into what was really an alleyway, an empty one, and vanished, a flicker of a golden, beribboned tail trailing after her.  
Xelloss made the same turn as soon as he could. 

The empty network of alleyways twisted and turned with labyrinthine complexity. The occasional glimpse of long blonde hair or a beribboned tail kept teasing him, leading him on and into an even seedier section of town then before. There were signs that this was where you went when you wanted to not been seen by those who mattered, or buy less-then-legal items.  
It had gotten dimmer while he was in the alleys, and was now almost fully dark gray. Xelloss doubted that it would get dark enough to see any stars in the sky, and for some reason he knew that he would see no moon in the sky at any time of darkness.  
As he made it around another twist in the narrow street, he heard moans and...other noises. It sounded like there were two giants making love around the corner, and there was a steady flicker of light.  
The street widened on one side into a concrete and metal garden, metallic trees with blackened metal box fronds and long low benches. The place was filled with people, mostly male but he could see the occasional woman, all of whom had brought a cushion or blankets with them to make the platforms a bit more comfortable for whatever they chose to do while watching, or at least listening, to the pornographic light-picture show that was being projected from somewhere onto the side of a building.  
Xelloss looked up at the flickering light-pictures. He could feel his face blanch, another reminder that he was somehow human. _What is going on?_ he thought.  
Amelia and Zelgadiss looked the same as they normally did -- or, rather, all that Xelloss could compare of the versions of the pair were the same.  
What they were doing in the moving pictures, though, were things Xelloss hadn't seen the like of since he had once had to venture into a seedy hole-in-the-wall club where the entertainment provided was people doing kinky sex acts on stage, much to his disgust.  
_Maybe_, he thought to himself, _if I can get Filia calm and relaxed enough, I can tell her that story...she'd understand._

He didn't see the figure he had been following again; he wandered on, though, looking and hoping that he would. Eventually he thought he saw the same blonde hair entering a particularly unsavory-looking cafe that had a clean grotty look to it.  
He went in, not sure what to expect to see inside. 

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There's only one more chapter planned for this part of the story... Encouragement in the form of reviews would be liked; I know I'll be writing the rest of this story even without it, but I'm not going to bother getting it into a postable, uploadable format if I don't think anybody particularly cares about it. I also work faster when I feel like others are actually interested, and that I'm not just writing this to get it out of my head... 


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